Chinese and Comparative Philosophy 中國哲學與比較哲學

Tetsugaku: International Journal of the Philosophical Association of Japan is an interesting-looking new journal, and its first issue contains an article called “The Birth of Philosophy as 哲學 (Tetsugaku) in Japan.” The article scrutinizes the history of the introduction of the subject from Holland to Japan, the coinage and application of the term tetsugaku (zhexue in Chinese), and its adoption in China during the late-nineteenth century. The article explains a lot about subtle changes in its coverage and nuance during the process. The journal and article are available from the following link:

Cambridge University Press has published East Asian Perspectives on Political Legitimacy: Bridging the Empirical-Normative Divide, edited by Joseph Chan, Doh Chuli Shin, and Melissa S. Williams. More details and table of contents here.

I am happy to announce that Philip J. Ivanhoe’s Three Streams: Confucian Reflections on Learning and the Moral Heart-Mind in China, Korea, and Japan (Oxford University Press, 2016) has been published. See here and here, and a summary follows.

Friday, Nov. 20, 3:00pm at Kent Hall 403 (Columbia University), the ever-stimulating Takahiro Nakajima will speak on “Confucianism for the People in Modern Japan: Ishizaki Tōgoku and Osaka Yōmei Gakkai.” For more information, see here.

The next session of the Columbia University Seminar on Neo-Confucian Studies (Seminar #567) will convene Friday, October 2, from 3:30 to 5:30pm in the Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University.

John A. Tucker of East Carolina University will present the paper “Yamazaki Ansai’s Discussion of Ren: Heartfelt Ethics and Historical Exemplars.” All are welcome to attend. Please join us after the seminar for dinner at a location to be announced. If you have any questions, contact one of our organizers: Ari Borrell (aborrell@msn.com), Tao Jiang (tjiang@rci.rutgers.edu), or Deborah Sommer (dsommer@gettysburg.edu).

The next session of the Columbia University Seminar on Neo-Confucian Studies (Seminar #567) will convene Friday, February 7, 2014 from 3:30 to 5:30pm in the Komoda Room of the Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University. We will have two presenters (copies of the papers are available from the organizers):

Michael Hoffman of the Japan Times reviews the English translation of A HISTORY OF JAPANESE POLITICAL THOUGHT, 1600-1901, by Hiroshi Watanabe (Translated by David Noble. LTCB International Library Trust, International House of Japan, 2012). Hoffman focuses on the “evolution of Japan’s turn away from Confucian ideas.” Looks interesting. Here is some of the review (read the whole review at the Japan Times).

Maybe all ideas are inherently strange, given the nonsense time tends to make of them. Imagine how odd our thinking will seem 100 years from now — or would have seemed 100 years ago. Is “freakish” too strong a word? Whether it is or not, the ideas Watanabe discusses here with such clarity and vigor are the ones that animated two of the most astonishing phases of Japanese and, arguably, world history: the 2½ centuries of peace under the Tokugawa shogunate (1600-1867) and the subsequent national transformation of backwater Japan into superpower Japan.

What were these ideas? You could, simplifying just a bit, divide them into two categories: Confucian and anti-Confucian. For pre-modern Japan, China was civilization itself, and Confucianism was what made it so — “perhaps the most powerful political ideology yet conceived by the human race,” writes Watanabe. To devotees, its “rites and music,” “five relationships” and “five virtues” are what separate us from the beasts and make us human. To doubters — and the doubts grew as Japan’s stagnation became more evident — it was a retarding force. “Ours is a world in which living things are confined and regimented as if dead things,” wrote one exasperated samurai-scholar in 1838. Continue reading “Japan Times Review of Watanabe”

Thursday, February 7, 12:00 p.m.Beyond the Samurai: Bushido as Philosophy of Death in Modern Japan
Chris Goto-Jones, Professor of Comparative Philosophy and Political Thought, and Dean of Leiden University
Moderator: Andrew Gordon, Lee and Juliet Folger Fund Professor of History, Harvard University
Porte Room (S250), CGIS South Bldg., 1730 Cambridge St.
Reischauer Institute special presentation

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